One of the questions that has perhaps been central to my own research in blockchain technology is: ultimately, what is it even useful for? Why do we need blockchains for anything, what kinds of services should be run on blockchain-like architectures, and why specifically should services be run on blockchains instead of just living on plain old servers? Exactly how much value do blockchains provide: are they absolutely essential, or are they just nice to have? And, perhaps most importantly...

With Ethereum getting close to its first official launch with Frontier, we have spent the last week of February at our holon in Switzerland discussing what the future of the Ethereum Foundation is going to look like. Since the start of the project, one of our primary dreams has been to not just deliver a world-class product, but also build a world-class organization, with quality of governance and transparency suitable for a foundation that would be tasked with helping to...

Stiftung Ethereum, the Zug, Switzerland-based Ethereum Foundation –ethereum.org, is seeking to immediately fill the Executive Director position within the Foundation. The role involves defining and discharging the day-to-day business of the Foundation and leading the organization at the executive level. The successful candidate will have significant experience in corporate finance activities and/or operations.  A technical (software, hardware, math, sciences) background is advantageous but not necessary. The ability to effectively operate in Switzerland and globally is essential and the successful candidate...

Few would argue against the fact that Ethereum has been gifted with one of the most diverse and thoughtful communities ever gathered around any open source project. Fueled by what can only be described as impassioned determination, developers from all walks of life have risked their time and credibility to pioneer in this radical and largely unknown domain of innovation. Indeed, even before genesis, Ethereum already boasts hundreds of projects covering everything from self-stabilizing currency to potential replacements for government...

Hello, fellow Ethereans. I am Mihai Alisie, one of the Ethereum founders, and for the past year I’ve served as the vice president of the Ethereum Foundation and as director of Ethereum Switzerland. During the last few months I’ve been researching and testing a number of collaborative tools, constantly assessing the usefulness and applicability of each tool in the context of our community. Why? Because I think there is a lot of untapped potential in this community, and I think...

History I came up with the first seed of this idea while chatting to Janislav Malahov in Berlin in Spring 2014. Unfortunately, the original article I wrote was lost along with my laptop when it was stolen in Vienna. After chatting over the principles with Vitalik more recently, we made a number of alterations and formalisations, mainly to the validation and the sub-state cutting mechanisms. What follows is a fairly complete illustration of one particular possible plan for block chain...

I’m a great believer in judging the present through the knowledge of the past. In the past 25 or so years one of the biggest trends in business and technology was what might loosely be termed as the open source revolution. The notion of it being good business to share your source code might not yet be cemented into the eyes of many a traditionalist, however the idea of leveraging existing open source software is. We are swiftly getting to...

Although the core concept was proven last summer when lead developers Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke initiated the PoC (proof-of-concept) series in Python, C++, and Go, a lot of engineering effort has gone to solidifying these implementations. We’re all anxious to release a stable command line client and issues flagged in the external audit are being resolved when uncovered. As soon as this process is complete, a general release should be around the corner. In the meantime, the rest...

Ethereum has been preparing what we consider to be the most exciting digital alliance since IBM and Microsoft partnered so successfully on the IBM PC. We know that you’ve been anticipating great things from Ethereum and we are delighted to present you with this exciting and unexpected news. As you know, mining in Ethereum is best done on graphics cards. However, industrial scale buying of expensive graphics cards to mine re-creates the centralized mining cartels which are so much a...